


noctuary

by CreepE



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Dick Grayson is Nightwing, Jason Todd is Red Hood, M/M, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-15
Updated: 2016-09-15
Packaged: 2018-08-15 03:29:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8040781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CreepE/pseuds/CreepE
Summary: Dick is captured by the Joker, who takes great pleasure in trying torture Batman's name out of him. Jason is forced to listen to the proceedings, and he's less than enthused that he can't do anything to help this time.





	noctuary

**Author's Note:**

> For a 'torture your favourite character prompt' that I hate my sister for giving me. I do not condone the torture of Dick Grayson. It's like condoning the torture of kittens and puppies. Warning: the torture is somewhat descriptive, so if you're triggered by torture, find a nice, fluffy thing where Dick is as happy as he deserves to be.

**noctuary**

-> _(n.) the record of a single night’s events, thoughts, or dreams_

 

The thing about torture is, it’s all a mental game. The Joker’s mind is a brilliant mental landscape, oh yes indeedy, and so of course he’s quite good at this game. He knows that the only thing worse than pain is the sight of something being irreparably done to your body, and he takes full advantage of that now. The scalpel he pulls out is such a tiny, itty bitty thing, yet somehow that seems to make the man before him even more worried.

“Only two words, maybe three if the middle is name is something _funny,_ ” the Joker giggles as he begins cutting away spandex. He likes this, taking his time with the suit as if unwrapping a present—he’s content to leave the mask for last. Nightwing squirms as the scalpel traces a light line down his body, blood beading where the Joker dug just a little too hard—accidentally of course, oh yes, why would he ruin the fun by digging too deep on _purpose?_ —and the Joker doesn’t bother stifling a cackle.

“The words aren’t that hard,” Nightwing says, though the bob of his Adam’s apple betrays the casualness of his voice. “The first one starts with f, ends with k, and has a uc in the middle, right?”

“This is why you’re my favourite, Nightwing. You’re never as serious as that ridiculous Batman, and never as grumbly as Red Hood. We’re going to have so much fun all night long! Oh, but don’t keep me waiting for _too_ long—Harley will get jealous.”

The Joker’s fingers are quick as a card trick when he reaches up and swipes the mask from Nightwing’s face, his eyes wide with anticipation. At the sight of a youthful, handsome face, however, his shoulders droop comically. It’s unfamiliar, this face. He doesn’t know why he expected anything else. It’s not like he has a huge network, mostly because a lot of his men end up dead before he really gets to know them. Oopsie daisey, but in this day and age it’s really hard to find someone who wants to _work_. He just can’t understand why running in with a bomb that could go off at any second is considered undesirable. If you’re really lucky, what’s the problem?

“Nightwing, report!” a tinny voice says in between the Joker’s gloating, and oh goodie, this game just got a hundred times more fun. Nightwing glares stubbornly as the Joker reaches into his ear like he’s about to give the kiddie boy a wet willie, then pulls a small speaker/mic set that looks all high-tech-fancy schmoops like something dear old Bats would come up with.

“That you, Batman, old pal?” the Joker shouts into the mic, hoping it is so that he blows the hearing from one of the serious man’s ears. There’s a long pause in which the Joker waits with one eyebrow raised into his lime hairline, then shrugs and sticks the speaker into his own ear. If Bats won’t talk now, it doesn’t matter much. He’ll be talking soon.

“Now, all you need to do is tell me who he is,” the Joker says sweetly as he rests one gloved hand on Nightwing’s shoulder and the other at his navel. Plus scalpel, of course. “Even if you tell me who you are, that’s certainly start. How about it, dear bird who’s about to sing ever so loud?”

“Oh me? If that’s all, I could’ve told you a while ago,” Nightwing chuckles as sweat drips from the end of his nose. “I’m… acro- _bat_ -ic.”

The Joker blinks a couple of times, then doubles over howling with manic laughter. Bats picked himself a great partner in this guy, a real comedian. It’s so funny that the Joker’s laughs almost cover up the gasp of pain Nightwing bites back when the Joker slices the soft, fleshy skin over his navel.

“W-why’d you cut me for?” Nightwing spits, gritting his teeth into a smile. “The pun wasn’t that _bat_ , _man_.”

Does he realize how much danger he’s in? What a brave little soul, truly, to taunt a grinning Joker holding a scalpel. The Joker would almost let him go under different circumstances, and he thinks maybe that’s why he keeps losing men. But having fun in life definitely depends on living on the whimsical side! Speaking of whimsical…

His cuts are deep and quick, carving a rough rectangle into Nightwing’s ridiculously hard, muscly chest. It’s enough that the kiddo’s lungs are heaving like he’s trying for the world record of breaths per minute, but not enough for Bats to really see what the show’s all about. And, after all, the Joker wants the show to be imagined in vivid detail.

“Now you see, kids, what I’m about to show you is called a _surgery,_ ” the Joker says conversationally as he dips the scalpel into the top corner of the rectangle he’s made. “Don’t try this at home. Or do. Yes, yes, actually— _do_ try this at home, kids! On your parents, your pets, your siblings… try it on _everyone!_ ”

He begins peeling the top layer of skin back, and although it’s not a wound that could kill someone (unless of course, it was left to fester and fester into black clumps of fun and magical disease) it draws a very nice amount of singing from his little birdie’s lips.

Nightwing’s screams are music to his ears, which he directs quite artistically with his scalpel. It’s all the more gratifying to see the skin he’s carving peel away and know that Nightwing is seeing it too. How scary, scary!  _Folks, ladies, gentlemen, and/or others, this is the show you came for! A night you’ll never forget!_

It takes him a moment to realize there’s a voice in his ear as well, a deep one that snaps him out of his fun and throws him into reality like a bucket of water on a drunk.

“Jesus, what the fuck are you doing?! What’s going on?!”

Oh. Oh that’s no fun, because the rough, demanding voice on the other end isn’t good old Bats after all. It’s just another slightly villainous hero with a chip on his shoulder, a penchant for not being funny, and a vendetta for some reason or another. The Joker thinks maybe he’s killed someone with that voice before—family member, twin? oh, who cares—but how’s a guy to remember every little life he’s taken?

“Jesus isn’t doing anything, my dearest Red Hood,” the Joker coos before dissolving into mad cackles at his own joke. He’s sure Nightwing would approve, if the dark-haired man wasn’t busy holding back gasps of pain and dripping an entire ocean onto the floor. “Though I’d be almost as surprised to see him as I am to hear you working with goody-two-shoes one-point-oh. Your life’s taken a drastic turn, it seems. Retiring from being a villain already? Was it a good run?”

“Shut up,” Red Hood snaps back, and oooh, how nasty. The Joker’s quaking in his boots. _Not_. “Let him go or I’ll put a round through your fucked up head.”

“Did you hear that, Nightwing, my bestest friend?” the Joker asks, slinging an arm around the half-naked acrobat. “He’ll shoot me if I don’t let you go! That joke’s too good, isn’t it? Because if he can shoot me now, doesn’t that mean he’s let me peel off a good chunk of that manly chest of yours? Guess he doesn’t like it all that much.”

He pats the area he’s just removed half of the skin from, and Nightwing’s groan sounds closer to the hoarse voice a bullfrog than one of a birdie. Huh. Who knew Nightwing doubled as Nightwebbedfeet sometimes.

“The fun’s only beginning, folks!” the Joker calls out to his huge, grinning audience of zero. Why had he picked an empty warehouse to trap Nightwing in? Why hadn’t he picked a mannequin warehouse instead, so he could get that true feeling of showing off? Silly him, next time that would be at the top of his list in ‘Places to Torture Nightwing In.’ Speaking of torturing Nightwing…

The Joker sets his scalpel down, trading it in for something a little more… fiery. Hardy har har har.

“The next step in surgery, after opening up and removing something, is sterilization! Well, only if you’re not planning to put anything back,” he cackles, and the sounds Nightwing makes when the Joker flicks the blowtorch over his chest are magggggnificent! Ten out of ten, across the board!

“What do you want?!” Red Hood shrieks almost frantically, and hey, the guy has a fun bone in his body after all.

“Oh, I want a lot of things. A TV show, McDonald’s, a new suit, the Batman’s name… you know, all the stuff normal people want,” the Joker taunts, and at the last thing he hears Red Hood’s sharp intake of breath. Oho! Is that confirmation that Nightwing actually knows it? Because, of course, the Joker’s not sure. He knows Nightwing and Bats work together, but he’s never been quite sure how close they are. Very close, apparently. Maybe Bats is a naughty boy with a thing for turning good boys naughty as well? Wouldn’t that just be too _hilarious_.

“How the fuck’s Nightwing s’posed to know that?” Red Hood grunts out, and the Joker pouts as Nightwing glares up at him through a veil of dark, pretty hair. Perfection for grabbing and jerking his head back really, which is exactly what the Joker does. He brings the torch up to Nightwing’s face, and grins like a fool—the profession, not the insult—when Nightwing can’t stifle a whimper of fear.

“Eyes in the sky, bird boy,” the Joker whispers, leaning forward and kissing a messy red mark onto the man’s pallid cheek. Then he brings the blowtorch closer, right near where the mark is (who said it had to be an X that marked the spot?) and watches in fascination when it’s close enough that the skin starts to peel and darken, but not close enough for the skin to burn right away. The sound Nightwing makes is terrifyingly humorous, something like “NNGHUUUAHHH” and the Joker has to laugh as the ending continues on and on and on until the Joker pulls the torch away.

“Stop it! Stop stop stopstopstop!!” Red Hood is screeching annoyingly through the earpiece, sounding as desperate a woman whose husband has a gun to his head. The Joker winks at Nightwing as if they share a secret, then reaches up to fiddle with the earpiece until he finds some buttons that do some stuff. Namely, making everything hearable from both sides, so that Nightwing can hear Red Hood’s agonized yells which are almost as pained as his own. They must know each other quite well. Especially since Nightwing’s eyes narrow and he tries to stifle his own insanely quick gasping.

“A…bort…” he pants out quickly, as if he thinks the Joker is going to interrupt this beautiful moment between lovers (or brothers, or friends, but isn’t it more amusing to picture Red Hood with a spandex fetish?).

“Nightwing,” Red Hood breathes out, and the Joker thinks he can actually see defeat in Nightwing’s posture. “Where the fuck are you? Tell me so I can—”

“No, no, no!” the Joker says angrily, grabbing Nightwing’s face and dropping his blowtorch to favour the scalpel again. “If you tell him, I’ll have to cut out your tongue, and I need that to tell me where Bats is! None of us three amigos want that, right?”

“Just… leave me…” Nightwing manages to get out. It’s so touching, the Joker pretends to wipe a tear away. “Sorry… for bringing you… into this…”

“Yes, truly sorry, Red, my boy,” the Joker cuts in. With his voice. And with his scalpel, cutting rather deep into the place he’d already burned. This time Nightwing tries to hold his noises in, but it doesn’t do much good other than making it sound like “—EUUGHHFFF” and turning a scream into a hiss at the end. Nightsnake. Nice ring, nice ring, maybe a six or seven out of ten.

“Now what you’ve just observed is what you do when you need to drain a wound,” the Joker sings out, digging his finger into the cut and making Nightwing’s entire body tense with pain and the effort of trying not to make a sound. The whimpers he can’t stop only sound particularly pathetic, though.

“Fuck,” Red Hood gasps out, oh so eloquently, as always. “Please, stop. Please, that’s enough, I’ll tell you—”

“No, do—UGNNNN.”

“Thanks for the input, but we’re having a private conversation,” the Joker chastises Nightwing as he casually digs the scalpel he’s moved. It rests comfortably under one of Nightwing’s nails now, and it must really hurt because there are tears mingling with the sweat and big boys shouldn’t cry. He tries pulling the scalpel up in curiosity, and the effect is immediate and hair-raising. In a good way, of course, because this time Nightwing doesn’t even try to stop screaming for the good two minutes it takes the Joker to work the nail free from its bed.

“Oh God, oh God, Gray—Nightwing, please stop, I’ll tell you, just—fuck, stop, leave him alone, for the love of shit, _leave him alone!_ ”

Apparently things are even more effective without narrating them. Red Hood must be really imaginative, despite his sour-puss attitude, because he’s begging into the speaker now and sounds almost as if he’s close to tears.

“DON’T TELL HIM!” Nightwing roars over Red Hood’s voice, leaving all humour behind for the sake of bluntness. And it’s too bad, really, because the Joker was one of the few people who could probably truly appreciate Nightwing’s brand of humour. Now he’s being bland, playing the part of the poor, martyred hero, and the Joker’s growing bored. He sticks the scalpel under another nail and begins working it free, when there’s a crash behind him and the window shatters into thousands of pretty, glittery pieces. The Joker wonders for a second if Red Hood’s been tracing the speaker, but of course Red Hood isn’t the most up-to-tech guy and the one who comes barging into the middle of the party is none other than the devil himself.

“Speak of the devil and there he is!” the Joker guffaws as he throws himself behind the chair he has Nightwing strapped to. He brings his scalpel up to Nightwing’s throat as none other than the Bats strides towards them, cape billowing behind him as if he’s an avenging dark knight. Oh how dramatic, probably makes women’s hearts flutter. He wants to ask Nightwing if Batman makes his heart flutter too, but Batman speaks before he can.

“Enough, Joker. Let him go and we’ll fight one on one.”

“Silly Bats, where’s the fun in that?” the Joker asks as he traces Nightwing’s jaw with the scalpel. He can’t hear Red Hood wailing his red little mask off anymore, but he’s too focused on the Bats to care. Sooo, the Bats cares about Nightwing, does he? Even if the Joker doesn’t know Batman’s real name, he’s found something else that’s real, and maybe maybe maybe this’ll be enough to push Bats over the edge. Dissolving into helpless maniacal laughter, the Joker begins to cut Nightwing’s throat with the proficiency of a card shark cutting the deck. Batman launches himself towards the two, but it’ll be too late by the time—

There’s the sound of gunshot, and suddenly the Joker is twirling (oh? he wasn’t aware he’d wanted to be a ballerina, although apparently his body is). A few moments later, the pain comes, and the Joker has to roll his eyes at how cliché this all is. Red Hood just had to show up right in the middle of everything and be ‘Hero of the Day™’ for Princess Nightdamsel. Too bad; the Joker would’ve been really interested to see the Bats’ reaction to the death of yet another of his boys. Though Nightwing wasn’t a Robin like the last one, now was he? _Was_ he? Hm…

He’d still like to fight Batman, but things have gotten a little too dicey and he’s never been lucky with dice. So he chooses the boring, conventional option of fleeing, if only because he now has information he’s never had before. Nightwing, the beginning of a name (‘Gray?’ Gray what? Not Gray hair, because Nightwing wasn’t an old fogie), and the hearts of both the Bats and Red Mask. Hood. Whoever he claimed to be. So the Joker flees, and he’s more than triumphant when not a single birdie chases him.

\---

Jason wants to go after the Joker, has never wanted anything so bad in his life. His hands itch to tear the son of a bitch apart piece by piece, and the gunshot to the shoulder just wasn’t enough blood to satisfy that. But even more than his want is his fear. Because the taste of ash in his mouth has never tasted so bad as it does now, after listening to Dick’s screams while that motherfucker burned him, cut him, and did who the hell knew what else.

Jason is at Dick’s side even before Bruce, mumbling curses under his breath as he undoes the straps keeping Dick’s hands bound down (Jesus, his _nails_ —Jason has to swallow a lump in his throat). Dick is only half-conscious, looking as if he’s drifting further away by the minute, and Jason regrets his actions on this particular night more than he’s regretted anything in his goddamn life. Dick had asked him to help chase the Joker, and Jason had tried to keep himself relatively reigned in because it was rare that Dick asked the younger previous Robin for help, but when he’d seen Harley he’d taken off in a hotheaded rage.

And left Dick to get hit by a tranq that the Joker had prepared, as if he’d expected the two of them to split up and had been planning to snatch Dick away all along. The two of them had been using Bruce’s technology, so Jason hadn’t been able to track Dick, and at first he’d been too stubborn to go ask Bruce for help. Yeah, that had fucking changed the moment he’d heard Dick’s first scream, but if he would’ve gone earlier…

“Jay,” Dick whispers as his head falls to lean against Jason’s stomach with a quiet thump. “Stop blaming yourself.”

Jason has to close his eyes at the kind gentleness in Dick’s eyes, the almost innocent naivety that never leaves him. He has no idea how Dick manages to live in this dark, corrupt place without taking a single hint of darkness into himself, but he finds it doesn’t really matter in that moment. All that matters is Bruce’s grim, weary face as he examines the wounds on Dick’s chest and face, and the way Dick’s eyes are still bright even after this.

“Hey, hey,” Dick gets out, and the hand with the nails still intact reaches over to encircle Jason’s wrist gently. “Don’t go looking like that. I’m fine. Still hot, still cutting edge, though if you keep looking like that you’ll cause a gaping wound in my chest.”

“That’s not even remotely funny,” Jason hisses, but his angry expression lessens when he realizes Dick’s pulling his pun routine just as much a distraction for himself while Bruce tries to stitch him up as for Jason. Then Jason swallows past the knot in his throat, and reaches up to curl his hand into Dick’s hair and cradle the older man to him. Dick’s still breathing fast, and flashes of pain cross his face in ghost grimaces, so Jason forces himself to hold Dick’s gaze while Bruce does everything he can.

“Sorry you had to hear all that,” Dick says, his voice sounding genuinely sorry.

“Don’t you dare apologize,” Jason snaps, and all he can think about is how helpless he felt when he heard Dick’s whimpers and screams coming from the speaker directly into his ear. Even as he hastened to find Bruce, he still felt like he hadn’t done _anything_ , and he was overcome with a wash of protectiveness for this man who by all rights could probably protect Jason. He wants to tell Dick that it should’ve been him, that he’s already fucked up so this wouldn’t be too bad, but he knows it would only make the acrobat angry.

“Just—don’t get hurt again,” Jason mutters, avoiding Dick’s eyes. He knows it’s impossible in their line of work, and he knows that he sounds like a kid in that moment, but his mouth had formed the words before his brain could catch up and—fuck. He just wants Dick Grayson at home, safe, preferably in a bubble where he couldn’t hurt himself because even when he’s not fighting he’s trying out crazy stunts that could probably get him killed.

When he looks back up, Dick is entirely amused, and Jason wants to cover his mouth so he can’t say a word.

“Whatever you say, Jay,” Dick chuckles, and Jason’s face heats up partly in embarrassment and partly because Dick Grayson laughing is the most attractive thing on the planet, fuck anyone who thinks otherwise. If he were a little braver—and if Bruce wasn’t eyeing him with the protectiveness everyone seemed to feel for Dick—Jason might’ve taken it a step further. Might’ve put all his emotions into an action that showed Dick his desperation, fear, and level of fierce protectiveness. Instead, he drags his eyes away from Dick’s lips and holds him just a little tighter, not really wanting to let go.

Afterwards, he’s proud of himself for not acting on his whim, because being in love with Dick Grayson is something a thousand people could tell you is a bad idea. Yet when they part ways that night and Bruce offers Dick a ride home, Dick’s goodbye is a little too much. With his lips right at Jason’s ear, whispering a happy ‘See ya soon, Jay,’ and the long, smoldering wink, Jason finds himself in a daze that’ll take weeks to break out of.

And he knows he’s well and truly fucked.


End file.
